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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Cognitive Science
On The Benefits Of Directness In Virtual Characters For Motivational Interviews, Michael O'Mahony, Cathy Ennis, Robert Ross
On The Benefits Of Directness In Virtual Characters For Motivational Interviews, Michael O'Mahony, Cathy Ennis, Robert Ross
Conference papers
Understanding the factors influencing successful engagement with Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) remains a significant challenge. This understanding could be used to personalise agents to users to improve interactions. Some studies have shown that simulating personalities in healthcare agents can improve effectiveness and engagement. However, it is not yet well understood how variations of agent personality can be leveraged to improve user engagement with Motivational Interviewing (MI) ECAs. Specifically how the balance between agent warmth and directness can be controlled in an MI agent to improve likeability and engagement. We conducted an online Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) mediated study of two variants of …
Habit Coach: Customising Rag-Based Chatbots To Support Behavior Change, Arian Fooroogh Mand Arabi, Cansu Koyuturk, Michael O'Mahony, Raffaella Calati, Dimitri Ognibene
Habit Coach: Customising Rag-Based Chatbots To Support Behavior Change, Arian Fooroogh Mand Arabi, Cansu Koyuturk, Michael O'Mahony, Raffaella Calati, Dimitri Ognibene
Conference papers
This paper presents the iterative development of Habit Coach, a GPT-based chatbot designed to support users in habit change through personalized interaction. Employing a user-centered design approach, we developed the chatbot using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, which enables behavior personalization without retraining the underlying language model (GPT-4). The system leverages document retrieval and specialized prompts to tailor interactions, drawing from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and narrative therapy techniques. A key challenge in the development process was the difficulty of translating declarative knowledge into effective interaction behaviors. In the initial phase, the chatbot was provided with declarative knowledge about CBT …
Getting To The Point: Contrasting Directness And Warmth In Motivational Embodied Conversational Agents, Michael O'Mahony, Cathy Ennis, Robert Ross
Getting To The Point: Contrasting Directness And Warmth In Motivational Embodied Conversational Agents, Michael O'Mahony, Cathy Ennis, Robert Ross
Conference papers
Enhancing long-term engagement with conversational agents remains a significant challenge. Controlling the perceived warmth or directness of an agent’s personality through the style of its generated text could be used to increase user likeability. This paper reports an investigation of a Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) mediated study of two variants of a motivational embodied conversational agent to measure user perception of and attitudes towards warmth in interaction style. Results show a significant effect of users preferring an agent with a "more direct" personality for this scenario, though this effect is in many ways nuanced.
Confirmation Report: Modelling Interlocutor Confusion In Situated Human Robot Interaction, Na Li
Confirmation Report: Modelling Interlocutor Confusion In Situated Human Robot Interaction, Na Li
Reports
Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is an important but challenging field focused on improving the interaction between humans and robots such to make the interaction more intelligent and effective. However, building a natural conversational HRI is an interdisciplinary challenge for scholars, engineers, and designers. It is generally assumed that the pinnacle of human- robot interaction will be having fluid naturalistic conversational interaction that in important ways mimics that of how humans interact with each other. This of course is challenging at a number of levels, and in particular there are considerable difficulties when it comes to naturally monitoring and responding to the …
A Framework For Confusion Mitigation In Task-Oriented Interactions, Na Li, Robert J. Ross
A Framework For Confusion Mitigation In Task-Oriented Interactions, Na Li, Robert J. Ross
Conference papers
Confusion is a mental state that can be triggered in task-oriented interactions and which can if left unattended lead to boredom, frustration, or disengagement from the task at hand. Previous work has demonstrated that confusion can be detected in situated human-robot interactions from visual and auditory cues. Therefore, in the next step, we propose appropriate interaction structures in this study, which should be used to mitigate confusion. We motivate and describe this dialogue mechanism through an information state-style dialogue framework and policies, and also outline the approach we are taking to integrate such a meta-conversational goal alongside core task-oriented considerations …
Hmm, You Seem Confused! Tracking Interlocutor Confusion For Situated Task-Oriented Hri, Na Li, Robert J. Ross
Hmm, You Seem Confused! Tracking Interlocutor Confusion For Situated Task-Oriented Hri, Na Li, Robert J. Ross
Articles
Our research seeks to develop a long-lasting and high-quality en- gagement between the user and the social robot, which in turn requires a more sophisticated alignment of the user and the system than is currently commonly available. Close monitoring of inter- locutors’ states, and we argue their confusion state in particular, and adjusting dialogue policies based on this state of confusion is needed for successful joint activity. In this paper, we present an ini- tial study of a human-robot conversation scenarios using a Pepper robot to investigate the confusion states of users. A Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) HRI experiment is illustrated in …
Transfer Of Personality Through Text Style, Michael O'Mahony, Robert Ross
Transfer Of Personality Through Text Style, Michael O'Mahony, Robert Ross
Other resources
The style of generated text is how something is said rather than what is said. We hypothesize that changing the style of generated text can change the perceived personality of the text generation agent. Dialogue systems that aim to imitate a human agent can appear to have a consistent personality through a consistent, controllable style of conversation. Some recent work on the style of generated text [1] performs impressively in the small number of domains selected for their experiments using transformer and LSTM-based models. Lin et al. [1] used weak supervised learning as their data set lacks parallel data. The …
Dialogue Policies For Confusion Mitigation In Situated Hri, Na Li, Robert J. Ross
Dialogue Policies For Confusion Mitigation In Situated Hri, Na Li, Robert J. Ross
Articles
Confusion is a mental state triggered by cognitive disequilibrium that can occur in many types of task-oriented interaction, including Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). People may become confused while interacting with robots due to communicative or even task-centred challenges. To build a smooth and engaging HRI, it is insufficient for an agent to simply detect confusion; instead, the system should aim to mitigate the situation. In light of this, in this paper, we present our approach to a linguistic design of dialogue policies to build a dialogue framework to alleviate interlocutor confusion. We also outline our sketch and discuss challenges with respect …
The Alignment Of Passage Tombs In Ireland – Horizons, Skyscape, And Domains Of Power, Frank Prendergast
The Alignment Of Passage Tombs In Ireland – Horizons, Skyscape, And Domains Of Power, Frank Prendergast
Book/Book Chapter
Neolithic passage tombs are one of four main types on the island of Ireland. This paper considers their orientation within a statistical and phenomenological framework and finds twenty-three examples which face the rising or setting sun at key times in the annual solar cycle, notably the solstices. The discussion reflects the current archaeoastronomical view that intentional solar alignment was of low precision because of the mostly crude architecture of the tombs. Any calendrical function, such as tracking time, should therefore be viewed as secondary. More significantly, astronomically aligned passage tombs are perceived to embody broader cultural and cosmological beliefs most …